Association for Computational Linguistics

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Association for Computational Linguistics
Association for Computational Linguistics logo.svg
Founded1962
Typeprofessional organization
FocusComputational linguistics / natural language processing
OriginsAssociation for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics
Area served
Worldwide
MethodConferences, publications
Websitewww.aclweb.org

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out. It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). It became the ACL in 1968.[1]

The ACL has a European ()[2] and a North American (NAACL) chapter.[3]

The ACL journal, Computational Linguistics, is the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.[4][5]

History[]

The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965 the AMTCL took over the journal . This journal was succeeded by many other journals: American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974—1978, 1980—1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984—present).[6]

The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference.[7] The annual meeting was, for much time, relatively informal and did not publish anything lengthier than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publishing of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979, and gradually matured into its modern form.[6] Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and Cognitive Science Society.[7]

The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, leading to a maturing of the ACL, characterised by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition. By the 21st century, the society was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.[8]

In 2020, the annual meeting of the ACL for the first time received more submissions from China than from the United States, reflecting the increasing geographical diversity of the society.[9]

Special Interest Groups[]

ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:[10]

SIG Description
SIGANN Linguistic Annotation
SIGBIOMED Biomedical Language Processing
SIGDAT Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches
SIGDIAL Dialogue Processing
SIGFSM Finite State Methods
SIGGEN Natural Language Generation
SIGHAN Chinese Language Processing
SIGHUM Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities
SIGLEX Lexicon: the umbrella organization for the SemEval semantic evaluations and word-sense evaluations
SIGMT Machine Translation
SIGMOL Mathematics of Language
SIGMORPHON Computational Morphology and Phonology
SIGNLL Natural Language Learning
SIGPARSE Natural Language Parsing
SIGSEM Computational Semantics
SIGSEMITIC Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages
SIGSLAV NLP for Slavic Languages
SIGSLPAT Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
SIGTYP Typology
SIGWAC Web as Corpus

Presidents[]

Each year the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later. Recent ACL presidents are:[11]

Year Name
2021 Rada Mihalcea
2020
2019 Zhou Ming
2018 Marti Hearst
2017
2016 Pushpak Bhattacharyya
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008 Bonnie Dorr
2007 Mark Steedman
2006 Jun'ichi Tsujii
2005 Martha Palmer
2004 Johanna Moore
2003
2002 John Nerbonne
2001 Eduard Hovy
2000 Wolfgang Wahlster

References[]

  1. ^ "What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  2. ^ "EACL Home". www.eacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  3. ^ Sarkar, Anoop. "NAACL: North American Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". naacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  4. ^ "List of Issues | Computational Linguistics | MIT Press Journals". www.mitpressjournals.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  5. ^ "Computational Linguistics". cljournal.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b Jones, Karen Sparck (1994). "Some Notes on ACL History". ACL. Retrieved 10 February 2021.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b Walker, Donald E. (1982). "Reflections on 20 Years of the ACL: An Introduction". 20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  8. ^ Anderson, Ashton; Jurafsky, Dan; McFarland, Daniel A. (2012). "Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008". Proceedings of the ACL-2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  9. ^ Chai, Joyce; Schluter, Natalie; Tetreault, Joel. "ACL2020: General Conference Statistics". ACL2020. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved 10 February 2021.
  10. ^ "Special Interest Groups | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  11. ^ "ACL Officers - Admin Wiki". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.

External links[]

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